… doesn’t this already exist?

I mean to say, anyone can already start a website and call it a wiki, set whatever policies they want, synchronize with other websites via RSS feed or whatever, and open it to editing by anyone and everyone (or no one) they choose.

And anyone does. There are hundreds of thousands of wikis out there.

The point of decentralization and federation was to merge the benefits of personal websites - privacy and personal control of your data - with the communication and collaboration powers of centralized social media. So your account is hosted on your instance and under your control and then you can go post on a thousand other instances with that same account. And I don’t think it’s failed in that.

But wikis are already personal websites. And if somebody wants to federate a wiki they can host it on the same server they have their Lemmy instance on and put a link on the Lemmy homepage.

And the idea that a bunch of people hosting their own wikis with no correction or accountability mechanisms will be less corrupt and have less disinformation then those same people working together to build consensus on the same website? Not persuasive, is all I’m saying.

Committing atrocities and then using your neighbors as human shields isn’t exactly good prepper etiquette.

But that aside, Hamas is not a community. It’s an armed group. It is parasitic on the Palestinian people. Its tunnels and supplies can only support a tiny fraction of the community and are funded by extorting the community and making the community less safe. What Hamas does is neither individual prepping nor community prepping - in prepper terms, Hamas are quite literally the people who stockpile ammo in order to rob their neighbors after law and order collapses, and it has, and they are.

I will never be convinced by arguments claiming that, at a given level of social and economic collapse, it’s better to not prepare for it and just die.

Nobody actually rolls over and dies. That’s where you get looters and gangs, because when things get bad enough unprepared people compromise their morals for the sake of survival and start stealing from other people.

And frankly, when you look at recent events, the “MREs and ammo” crew have more of a point every day.

Community relationships, community-based preparation for disaster and economic hardship, sustainable communities of every sort, are all very good things.

But in March 2020 when everything locked down and people literally could not leave their houses to get food or toilet paper, having some MREs or a deep pantry or some other form of individual food prep helped a lot of people until we were allowed to leave our houses and get food deliveries and so on. And frankly, if the next pandemic is more lethal and more dangerous and a 100% quarantine becomes necessary, that kind of individual food prep will be even more vital.

Because as wonderful as community is, just a few years ago the world went through an event where community members could not help one another because everybody was quarantined. Individual and household prep was what helped there.

And if you were a Palestinian living in Gaza on October 7, 2023, having a sustainable community wouldn’t mean shit.

What would have protected you and your family was food, water, a plan to get to the border with Egypt, cash or gold to bribe your way through, and weapons to protect yourself and your family on the way there.

Which is exactly what the right wing “collapse of America” doomsday preppers are prepping for - a collapse so violent and so extensive that your community will not survive and your only hope is to flee far from the chaos and hole up in the hope things get better.

And I really can’t criticize anybody who plans for that anymore.

if you wanted to ensure authenticity of any data you’d most likely need a blockchain

Lol no.

are there any actual real world uses for that? Like day-to-day things that make a persons life easier, not harder?

No. Web3 is a marketing scam designed to sell crypto tokens. The tokens are also scams.

Being uneducated on web3 is like being uneducated on the benefits of Amway. Some information isn’t worth the neurons it takes to store.